Post by David...
This is why the BDS campaign is so important, becauce divstement and
boycotting Israeli exports will hurt them.
David
The latest Workers Hammer has a good statement on BDS and a Marxist
analysis of Israel, which I'm posting. First time I've posted the SL
stance on Israel/Palestine here, good timing with V and D on the run a
bit. Fractal originally requested Marxist analyses of the question,
this is a contribution to that.
There is also a good statement on Gaza in the issue, which quotes
Norman Finkelstein by the way, and a great quote as a separate
"Archives of Marxism" item from Abram Leon, suitable for ramming down
Dusty's throat if he tries again to claim that he is just a follower
of Leon.
-jh-
http://www.spartacist.org/english/wh/211/Boycotts.html
Workers Hammer No. 211, Summer 2010
Defend the Palestinians against Zionist state terror!
For proletarian internationalism, not appeals to imperialism!
On boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions
Particularly since the Zionist rulers’ massacre on the Gaza aid
flotilla, many defenders of the oppressed Palestinians have renewed
their calls for “boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions” (BDS) against
Israel. As revolutionary internationalists, we support time-limited
trade union actions against the Israeli state. An example is the
Swedish dock workers’ action boycotting Israeli ships and goods coming
from or destined for Israel from 22 to 29 June in protest against
Israel’s attack on the “Freedom Flotilla”. In general, we are in
favour of the trade unions refusing to handle military goods being
shipped to Israel, which would be a blow not only against the Zionist
rulers but also against the British, US and other imperialist ruling
classes.
But while we support the proposed action of the Swedish dockers, we
oppose the political strategy of the reformist union bureaucracies
that initiated it. While raising the supportable demand for lifting
the blockade of Gaza, the call for the Swedish workers action
alsodemands that “Israel pays respect to international law” and calls
for “a general blockade of Israeli goods until the rights of the
Palestinian people are guaranteed and the blockade of Gaza is lifted”.
In a similar vein, a recent statement signed by British union leaders
Tony Woodley, Dave Prentis, Billy Hayes, Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka
says: “We call on the British government and the European Union to
suspend the EU-Israel association agreement and to end their support
for the blockade and collective punishment of the men, women and
children of Gaza. We call for support for a policy of boycott of
Israeli products, disinvestment from Israeli companies and sanctions
against Israel until justice for the Palestinian people has been
achieved” (Guardian, 5 June).
We are politically opposed to standing boycotts and to campaigns for
disinvestment and sanctions against Israel, which are counterposed to
the international working-class struggle on which the liberation of
the Palestinians is premised. BDS campaigns serve to promote illusions
in the benign nature of other capitalist powers — not least British
imperialism — relative to Israel. If successful, boycott campaigns
would hurt the working class of Israel, both Hebrew-speaking and Arab,
causing mass layoffs and weakening its social power, which can and
must be mobilised to smash the Zionist state from within through
socialist revolution.
The reformist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) supports the strategy of
BDS and explains its broad aims in an article titled “The fight
against Israeli apartheid” in Socialist Worker (19 June) which says:
“The BDS strategy is to seek international support and solidarity
until Israel complies with international law: that means Israel must
end the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza and apply
its own laws equitably and universally to Jew and to Arab alike.
“BDS is about building an international movement to isolate Israel
economically, culturally and academically. It is about persuading
artists, writers, and performers not to work in Israel — following the
examples of Gil Scott-Heron, Elvis Costello and others. It is about
identifying Israeli products that are imported into Britain — not just
those produced by settlements on illegally confiscated Palestinian
resources — and pressing importers and outlets not to stock them. It
is about gathering from supermarket shelves all products illegally
produced in the West Bank and presenting them to the managers to help
them avoid prosecution for selling stolen goods.”
The article notes that “BDS is NOT about boycotting individual Israeli
scholars or academics”, but is an “institutional boycott”. In the face
of a vicious Zionist outcry against British unions which had called
for academic boycotts of Israel in 2006 we wrote: “The Spartacist
League and the Spartacus Youth Group call for the defence of the UCU
[University and College Union] and other unions and organisations
against the Zionist backlash and recognise that the boycott campaign
is motivated out of solidarity with the oppressed
Palestinians” (Workers Hammer no 196, Autumn 2006). At the same time,
we noted that:
“The university unions’ boycott, which is part of the wider divestment
campaign against Israel, represents an appeal to the supposed morality
of British and European academic institutions and funding bodies to
sever any links with the brutally oppressive and murderous Israeli
regime. The problem with this is that the universities in Britain are
no less attached to the British state than they are to the Israeli
state in Israel. And the British imperialist state is no less bloody
than the Israeli state.”
From India to Kenya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland, British
imperialism has left a trail of carnage around the globe throughout
its history. The present bloody mess in the Near East is itself the
legacy of the “divide-and-rule” machinations of British imperialism
when it was the dominant world power.
Appealing to the blood-soaked British imperialists, Socialist Worker
(5 June) put forward a call that “We must force Britain to break all
links with Israel, including shutting down its embassy.” The notion
that the British government, corporations or campus administrations
(or for that matter, the EU or the UN) can be “persuaded” to promote
economic and social justice is ludicrous. But the programme of the SWP
rests on the myth that British imperialism can be pressured into
acting on behalf of the oppressed and perpetuates the very illusions
in imperialist “democracy” that Marxists seek to destroy. As we said
in “Zionist backlash over ‘boycott Israel’ ”(Workers Hammer no 196,
Autumn 2006):
“Why not call for a boycott of all British consumer goods, protesting
the British rulers’ brutality against the oppressed Catholic minority
in Northern Ireland, not to mention British imperialism’s role in the
subjugation of Iraq and Afghanistan? Not only does this promote
illusions in the ‘democratic’ and ‘civilised’ nature of other
capitalist powers and corporations which the campaign seeks to
dissuade from doing business with Israel, such a campaign is actually
anti-working class.”
Boycotts and apartheid South Africa
The “boycott, disinvestment and sanctions” campaign is consciously
modelled on the campaign for disinvestment from and sanctions against
apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. Writing in the Guardian (10
January 2009), Naomi Klein argued that “The best strategy to end the
increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of
the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South
Africa.” The disinvestment campaign against South Africa in Europe and
North America was centrally promoted by the bourgeoisnationalist
African National Congress (ANC). It was based on a claim that South
African capitalism could be fundamentally reformed through pressure
from “democratic” imperialist powers such as the US and Britain. In
fact, it was not disinvestment, but the mass social struggles of the
black and other non-white toilers, centred on the working class, which
brought an end to direct white-supremacist rule in South Africa. The
significant wage gains won by black class struggle and the instability
caused by a growing strike movement deterred investment in South
Africa.
At the time, our organisation uniquely told the truth: that
disinvestment was at best an empty moral gesture; that if foreign
companies did withdraw substantial productive assets this would hurt
black workers and weaken the powerful black union movement; and, most
crucially, that it was obscene to look to US imperialism and its
British junior partner as a force for “democracy” anywhere in the
world. The disinvestment that did occur largely took the form of
overseas corporations signing over their interests to local
subsidiaries, which often treated their workers even more brutally.
Indeed, 1989 saw strikes by black oil and rubber workers in South
Africa against such disinvestment schemes. As we wrote in “Black
Workers Strike Against ‘Divestment’ Union-Busting” (Workers Vanguard
no 486, 29 September 1989), “The only kind of ‘divestment’ that will
benefit the exploited and oppressed will be proletarian revolution,
and the expropriation of these riches by a black-centered workers
government as part of a socialist federation of southern Africa.” That
remains no less true today, as ANC leaders like Jacob Zuma continue to
serve as black front men for a neo-apartheid capitalist system whose
fundamental character, including enormous disparities between racial
groups, has remained intact.
For a socialist federation of the Near East!
The Spartacist League and other sections of the International
Communist League intervened into the recent protests against the
Zionist attacks on the flotilla to express our solidarity with the
Palestinian masses and to put forward the only perspective —
international socialist revolution — that can put an end to
Palestinian national oppression. The myriad peoples of the Near East
will not know peace, justice or prosperity until bourgeois rule in the
region is overthrown through a series of socialist revolutions. As
revolutionaries in Britain, solidarity with the oppressed in
neocolonial countries means first and foremost opposing our own ruling
class and fighting to bring down British imperialism through socialist
revolution at home.
The hideous oppression of the Palestinians today, including the siege
of Gaza, is an expression of the barbaric rule of capitalist
imperialism and Zionist nationalism. For more than 60 years,
Palestinians have suffered under the jackboot of Zionist Israel — an
oppression that has intensified since the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary
destruction of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the USSR, which acted
as a counterweight to US imperialism internationally, deprived the
late Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) of crucial
diplomatic and financial support, paving the way for the ignominious
1993 US imperialism-sponsored Oslo “peace” accords, establishing the
Palestinian Authority as the Zionists’ police auxiliaries in the
Occupied Territories. In an article headlined “Israel-PLO Deal for
Palestinian Ghetto” we wrote that this deal “does not offer even the
most deformed expression of self-determination” and “would place the
PLO’s seal on the national oppression of the long-suffering
Palestinian Arab masses” (Workers Hammer no 137, September/October
1993). It was this betrayal by the secular-nationalist PLO that paved
the way for the rise of reactionary Islamic groups like Hamas and
Islamic Jihad among the Palestinians.
Since Oslo, one “peace” accord after another has been heralded as
opening the door to Palestinian national emancipation. In reality,
Zionist oppression of the Palestinians has only intensified, leading
to ever deadlier cycles of terror against the Palestinian population.
Israel’s rulers have increasingly driven the Palestinians into
bantustan-like enclaves demarcated by a heavily-guarded wall and
sliced up by Zionist settlements, checkpoints and bypass highways.
Gaza is little more than a concentration camp: an impoverished,
devastated strip where 1.5 million Palestinians are trapped,
surrounded by the sea, an electrified fence and a wall sealing its
border with Egypt. All Zionist troops and settlers out of the West
Bank and East Jerusalem!
Both the Palestinian and Hebrew-speaking nations have the right to
self-determination, but because the two nations are geographically
interpenetrated, self-determination for one can only be achieved by
denying it to the other. Under capitalism, every “solution” to the
Palestinian national question either perpetuates the oppression of the
Palestinian Arab people or envisions a reversal of the terms of
oppression, denying the legitimate national rights of the Hebrew-
speaking people. In situations of interpenetrated peoples, a
democratic solution to the national question can be achieved only
through socialist revolution, because only the proletariat in power
has an interest in resolving national antagonisms and can begin to
meet the material needs of all working people.
We make a distinction between the Hebrew-speaking nation living in
Israel and the Zionist state. This is counterposed to the view of the
Zionists, and indeed of the Islamic fundamentalists, who equate the
Zionist state with the Hebrewspeaking people. The Zionist state is not
only a catastrophe for Palestinians — it is also a deathtrap for Jews.
Some 25 per cent of citizens live in poverty and income disparities
are higher than in Egypt and Jordan. Sephardic Jews, though
overwhelmingly under the sway of right-wing and religious parties,
suffer widespread discrimination and poverty. The Palestinian Arabs,
nominally “citizens” who constitute 20 per cent of Israel’s
population, are consigned to segregated, impoverished areas and low-
paid, unskilled jobs.
Israeli society is not a seamless reactionary mass. Despite widespread
support in Israel for the Gaza blockade, there have been
demonstrations against the brutal killings on the flotilla, including
a 6000-strong rally in Tel Aviv on 5 June. It is the false
consciousness of religion and Zionist nationalism and racism — in the
face of pervasive anti-Semitism — that is the glue binding the Hebrew-
speaking proletariat to its Israeli ruling-class enemy. As long as
Zionist oppression of Palestinians continues, Israeli Jews will
continue to be a target of hatred and outrage by the more than 100
million Arabs who surround them. It is only the working class of
Israel — Hebrew and Arab — that has the capacity to destroy the
Zionist citadel from within.
As Marxists, we fight to bring the class question to the fore. The
only road to social and national liberation for the Palestinians —
including the right of all refugees and their descendants to return to
their homeland — and all the other peoples of the Near East lies
through common class struggle by the Arab, Hebrew-speaking and other
working classes of the region. For the Palestinians, this means
recognising the right of the Hebrew-speaking people to national self-
determination. In turn, breaking the Hebrew-speaking workers from
their Zionist rulers requires that they champion the national rights
of the Palestinians. We have no illusions that winning the Hebrew-
speaking proletariat to this perspective will be an easy task. Indeed,
it will likely require the victory of socialist revolution in one of
the other Near Eastern states to break the Hebrew-speaking proletariat
from Zionist chauvinism. This task is not made easier by the criminal
indiscriminate terror bombings carried out by Islamic forces against
Israeli civilians, which drive the Hebrewspeaking population further
into the arms of the Zionist rulers.
At the same time, the solidarity of the Arab masses with the oppressed
Palestinian people must be directed towards proletarian revolution
against their own Arab rulers, who, whether bourgeois nationalists or
Islamic traditionalists, are fundamentally the political agents of
Western imperialism. If this does not happen, the intense and
justifiable hostility against Israel and its American protector will
serve to further strengthen the forces of Islamic fundamentalism,
which posture as the “radical” opposition to the mainly pro-Western
Arab regimes. We look to the proletariat of the region more widely,
such as in Egypt, which has been a centre of working-class strikes and
protests over the past several years. With some 50 per cent of the
Palestinian population living outside the Occupied Territories — in
Jordan, Lebanon, Israel — the national liberation of the Palestinians
demands a perspective of socialist revolution throughout the Near
East, including within Israel, the most powerful and economically
advanced country in the region. It is vital to forge revolutionary
Marxist parties throughout the Near East to unite the proletariat —
Arab, Persian, Kurdish and Hebrew, Sunni and Shi’ite, Muslim and
Christian — in struggle against imperialism and to smash the Zionist
garrison state from within and sweep away the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan, the Syrian Ba’athist bonapartists and the capitalist rulers of
Lebanon through socialist revolution. For a socialist federation of
the Near East!
Our proletarian internationalist perspective is counterposed to those
reformists who tail Islamic fundamentalism, such as the SWP. Socialist
Worker (10 January 2009) ran an article titled “Hamas’s history of
resistance”, enthusing over Hamas as the “bearer of a tradition of
Palestinian resistance”. Islamic fundamentalists like Hamas and
Islamic Jihad are vile anti-Jewish and anti-Christian religious bigots
who seek to enslave women and extirpate any manifestations of social
progress. Hamas is descended from the clerical-fascist Muslim
Brotherhood, which became particularly prominent in Egypt in the late
1940s. Under the slogan “communism = atheism = liberation of women”,
the Muslim Brotherhood mobilised a terror campaign against Communists
and other secular forces. Hamas preaches the social segregation of
women, the wearing of the hijab (Islamic headscarf) and anti-woman
sharia law. Far from embodying a “history of resistance”, Hamas was
initially supported by Israel as a counterweight to the secular-
nationalist PLO. Carrying out attacks on secularists and Communists,
the Islamists engaged in neither political nor military struggle
against Israel.
With the beginning of the first Intifada in 1987, the Islamists feared
that if they stood aside they would lose their following. Hamas was
founded in the spring of 1988 as an Islamist political movement with
an armed wing. Hamas sought to fuse the national struggle, previously
a secular movement containing a leftist component, with reactionary
Islamic fundamentalism. It was only in the autumn of 1989, after
discovering that Hamas had killed two Israeli soldiers, that Israel
broke relations with the group.
The Arab bourgeois regimes have always been enemies of Palestinian
national liberation. When the Arab armies went to war with Israel in
1948, it was not to “liberate” Palestine but to carve it up among
themselves. Between 1948 and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the West Bank
and Gaza were occupied by Jordan and Egypt respectively. And the
Palestinians there remained politically dispossessed and subject to
brutal repression. In the decade following the 1967 war, nearly 50,000
Palestinians were slaughtered by Arab governments, including some
10,000 militants killed by the Jordanian monarchy in the 1970 Black
September massacre.
The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which laid the basis for the liberation
of the tsarist empire’s many subjugated peoples, was a beacon of
liberation for the oppressed throughout the world, inspiring anti-
colonial revolts throughout the Near East. This legacy continued
despite the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR. In 1958, Iraqi workers
led by the multinational Iraqi Communist Party — which included
Muslims, Jews and Christians, Arabs and Kurds — fought to make a
revolution and came to the brink of power. However, this and other
revolutionary opportunities were betrayed by the Kremlin and the
Stalinist-led Communist parties, subordinating the proletariat to an
alliance with “progressive” bourgeois nationalists, who, once in
power, launched a blood-bath against the Communist-led workers.
What is necessary is the forging of revolutionary Marxist parties
throughout the Near East, built in opposition to all forms of
nationalism and religious fundamentalism, and committed to the
struggle for socialist revolution, which, on an international scale,
can finally open the door to human equality and liberation. The
conquest of power by the proletariat in the Near East does not
complete the socialist revolution, but only opens it by changing the
direction of social development. But that social development can be
consolidated only through the international extension of the
revolution, particularly to the advanced, industrialised imperialist
countries.
Defence of those subjugated by the imperialists around the globe
demands the pursuit of class struggle in Britain, the US and other
imperialist centres, pointing towards a proletarian struggle for
power. The Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International
Communist League, is committed to the fight to forge a multiethnic
revolutionary workers party to lead the proletariat in the struggle to
sweep away British imperialism through socialist revolution.